AI Solved: Question textSection F: Read the text on development in Australian cities and answer the following questions.1. Australian governments have historically focused on building and expanding the cities. The need to provide housing for more people is the reason given for expanding cities out and up, but it is in fact the taxes s that flow from land transfers and construction that push forward the endless development of Melbourne and Sydney, in particular. Property development is the single largest contributor to Victorian and New South Wales’ government funds.2. Since 2020, city councils have been understandably anxious to attract people back to their centres. Their expectations of constant growth in the number of students and workers returning from overseas may be based more on hope than reason. The causes of population growth are more uncertain, and Australia can no longer depend on global migration at previous levels. Birth rates are falling across the developed world and online international education is expanding. However, cities do not have to become larger to evolve. Instead, Australia must become less reliant on importing skilled workers, students and materials. It would be preferable to make more effective use of local resources and produce much more of what is needed locally.3. Australian cities have the potential to be great. They have amazing cultural scenes. Their biomedical capabilities are among the world’s best, and their education sector remains exportable online and via existing overseas campuses. The local manufacturing sector still has a base to build on and provide more of the products Australians need. The renewable energy capacity is unlimited. It is possible to invest in research and development and maintain wealth through innovation and production, rather than the endless consumption of land.4. Adapting to changing conditions means rethinking not just what and how cities are built, but why. Before allocating land for yet more housing estates, for example, it is important to consider the fact that a million homes, 10% of Australia’s housing stock, were empty in 2022. The national survey found that there were nearly 600,000 unoccupied homes in Victoria and New South Wales. For years research has demonstrated that high numbers of vacant homes were unavailable for rent. Implementing higher taxes on homes left vacant would lead to many more of them being released onto the rental market.5. The argument that the only way to make housing more affordable is to build more homes has been repeatedly refuted by years of careful research. Tens of thousands of homes have been added to the inner cities of Melbourne and Sydney over the past 20 year. However, average prices have not decreased. While prices of high-end apartments might drop a little when rental vacancy rates increase, apartment developers are alert to any dip in profits. At the slightest hint of a surplus, they stop building. If the object of urban expansion is housing affordability, the only way to achieve it is to build social housing for low-income earners. More than enough land is available within the urban growth boundaries for residential development.6. The abundance of vacant blocks of land in Australian cities presents an opportunity for urban planning to address the lack of affordable homes. Recent research shows there are 84,000 undeveloped housing blocks in Australian cities. This does not include the many inner-city regeneration projects under way. Social housing available for low-income earners to rent in these areas should be the focus of urban planning before any more land is released.7. Unlike these vacant privately-owned blocks, some believe that the land currently occupied by industry should be developed for housing. However, much of this land is low-lying and has been found to be unsuitable for housing. This is mainly due to occasional flooding, which is not necessarily a problem for industry. It would not be wise, and the expense would be high to build housing there. In addition, due to weaknesses in global supply lines, the need for sustainable local production is higher than ever. The diminishing industrial lands should be preserved for industry.8. This is not an argument for decreasing construction: there is much work to be done updating existing buildings. These need new exteriors, more effective air flow, and passive cooling to adapt to the warming climate. A forward-looking city plan would consolidate and upgrade the structures already in place. That is the way to increase investment in the inner-city areas that is environmentally, socially and politically sustainable. (719 words)Questions 19–22. Which paragraph contains the following supporting information? Match the information to the paragraph number. 19. A description of some of the resources that can be utilised for development 20. An example that demonstrates how building new homes does not reduce costs 21. Evidence that there are enough homes to ease the current housing crisis 22. The author’s view on how to use blocks of land that have not been developedParagraph 1Paragraph 2Paragraph 3Paragraph 4Paragraph 5Paragraph 6Paragraph 7Paragraph 819. Answer 1 Question 10[select: , Paragraph 1, Paragraph 2, Paragraph 3, Paragraph 4, Paragraph 5, Paragraph 6, Paragraph 7, Paragraph 8]20. Answer 2 Question 10[select: , Paragraph 1, Paragraph 2, Paragraph 3, Paragraph 4, Paragraph 5, Paragraph 6, Paragraph 7, Paragraph 8]21. Answer 3 Question 10[select: , Paragraph 1, Paragraph 2, Paragraph 3, Paragraph 4, Paragraph 5, Paragraph 6, Paragraph 7, Paragraph 8]22. Answer 4 Question 10[select: , Paragraph 1, Paragraph 2, Paragraph 3, Paragraph 4, Paragraph 5, Paragraph 6, Paragraph 7, Paragraph 8] | Reading Comprehension | English | Black Tom

Write ONE WORD from the text to complete the sentence. 24. ‘their’ in paragraph 4 refers to Answer Question 12[input].

Section FRead the text on urban housing and answer the following questions. 1. Melbourne - and indeed, all of Australia - will experience massive growth over the next decades – but where will these people live? And perhaps more importantly, how will they live? A TEDx talk by Jeremy McLeod, founder and director of Breathe Architecture, explores these questions. The answer is certainly not more suburban sprawl, but it’s also not necessarily high-density high rise. Unlike New South Wales, Victoria doesn’t have strict controls on minimum design quality in apartments – and in Melbourne the overheated property market has led to the construction of some truly terrible high-rise housing.2. So what might be an alternative to some of the poor quality, environmentally destructive, socially alienating and prohibitively expensive housing on the market today? McLeod describes how, back in 2007, he and a group of five architect colleagues got together to address exactly this question. They proposed The Commons: a medium-density housing development which would set out to meet a “triple bottom line” purpose: achieving social, environmental and financial sustainability. While that development was a success in design terms, it failed to be financially sustainable.3. It was at this point that McLeod and his collaborators made their revolutionary move, and came up with what they call the Nightingale Model (a financial paradigm). This shift is the real genius here: moving beyond an architectural model to a financial one, redesigning the funding process before designing any building. The Nightingale Model works on the principle of paring back construction costs (the lack of car parking has been controversial, but if you don’t have a car, and you do have a train, a tram, and a bike path outside your door, then it seems like a no-brainer). 4. It then goes further – by connecting directly with potential owner-occupiers it cuts out the marketing budget, relinquishing the need for an expensive display suite, or real estate agents. These savings are passed on to buyers. But any big construction project still needs financiers, and Nightingale 1.0 has twenty five of them, in addition to the future homeowners themselves, and the architects in the collective. But these are small investors, and their profits are capped at 15%. The cap removes any incentive to increase profit by squeezing quality, and there’s also a limit on how much apartments will be able to be sold for – for twenty years they can only be sold for the average price rise in the suburb on top of their purchase price. The point is that this is not an investment property which can be flipped to turn a swift buck.5. The Nightingale model is scalable and replicable: it is not specific to a particular site or design, and can be rolled out across every city in Australia (or even the world!). Sure enough, there are already three projects at various stages of development – Nightingale 1.0, in Brunswick, has achieved council approval and begun site works, while another project in Fairfield is well advanced, and a third is in planning stages.6. There has been so much interest from potential buyers in Nightingale 1.0 (reportedly 800 people on a waitlist for 44 apartments) that they had to be selected by ballot. Other property developers in Melbourne are reportedly flabbergasted at the project’s popularity in spite of its having broken all the rules about what people (supposedly) want in apartments.7. So, what do we make of all this? The Nightingale model is in fact quite close to a housing collective – a model with a long (and still active) history in Australian cities. But Nightingale goes beyond the post-hippie gaggle of friends that makes up many housing collectives, to a scale that is much larger, and much more ambitious. It’s no coincidence many collectives are packed with architects – who invariably believe that there are other values more important than money, and that architecture is more than a branch of real estate.8. That said, it’s not common for architects to initiate a project from scratch. As the critic Reyner Banham once wrote, architects spend their professional lives standing ready to be “propositioned” by a client: “[They] depend upon someone coming forward with the proposition in one hand and the money bag in the other.” The Nightingale team have set out to avoid this compromise by sticking to low-cost principles and finding ways to fund their projects, keeping the owner-occupier and the architect at the centre of the process. Questions 23 – 24 . What do the underlined words in the text refer to? Write ONE WORD from the text to compete the sentences. 23. ‘them’ in paragraph 4 refers to Answer Question 11[input].

Question textSection FRead the text on urban housing and answer the following questions. 1. Melbourne - and indeed, all of Australia - will experience massive growth over the next decades – but where will these people live? And perhaps more importantly, how will they live? A TEDx talk by Jeremy McLeod, founder and director of Breathe Architecture, explores these questions. The answer is certainly not more suburban sprawl, but it’s also not necessarily high-density high rise. Unlike New South Wales, Victoria doesn’t have strict controls on minimum design quality in apartments – and in Melbourne the overheated property market has led to the construction of some truly terrible high-rise housing.2. So what might be an alternative to some of the poor quality, environmentally destructive, socially alienating and prohibitively expensive housing on the market today? McLeod describes how, back in 2007, he and a group of five architect colleagues got together to address exactly this question. They proposed The Commons: a medium-density housing development which would set out to meet a “triple bottom line” purpose: achieving social, environmental and financial sustainability. While that development was a success in design terms, it failed to be financially sustainable.3. It was at this point that McLeod and his collaborators made their revolutionary move, and came up with what they call the Nightingale Model (a financial paradigm). This shift is the real genius here: moving beyond an architectural model to a financial one, redesigning the funding process before designing any building. The Nightingale Model works on the principle of paring back construction costs (the lack of car parking has been controversial, but if you don’t have a car, and you do have a train, a tram, and a bike path outside your door, then it seems like a no-brainer).4. It then goes further – by connecting directly with potential owner-occupiers it cuts out the marketing budget, relinquishing the need for an expensive display suite, or real estate agents. These savings are passed on to buyers. But any big construction project still needs financiers, and Nightingale 1.0 has twenty five of them, in addition to the future homeowners themselves, and the architects in the collective. But these are small investors, and their profits are capped at 15%. The cap removes any incentive to increase profit by squeezing quality, and there’s also a limit on how much apartments will be able to be sold for – for twenty years they can only be sold for the average price rise in the suburb on top of their purchase price. The point is that this is not an investment property which can be flipped to turn a swift buck.5. The Nightingale model is scalable and replicable: it is not specific to a particular site or design, and can be rolled out across every city in Australia (or even the world!). Sure enough, there are already three projects at various stages of development – Nightingale 1.0, in Brunswick, has achieved council approval and begun site works, while another project in Fairfield is well advanced, and a third is in planning stages.6. There has been so much interest from potential buyers in Nightingale 1.0 (reportedly 800 people on a waitlist for 44 apartments) that they had to be selected by ballot. Other property developers in Melbourne are reportedly flabbergasted at the project’s popularity in spite of its having broken all the rules about what people (supposedly) want in apartments.7. So, what do we make of all this? The Nightingale model is in fact quite close to a housing collective – a model with a long (and still active) history in Australian cities. But Nightingale goes beyond the post-hippie gaggle of friends that makes up many housing collectives, to a scale that is much larger, and much more ambitious. It’s no coincidence many collectives are packed with architects – who invariably believe that there are other values more important than money, and that architecture is more than a branch of real estate.8. That said, it’s not common for architects to initiate a project from scratch. As the critic Reyner Banham once wrote, architects spend their professional lives standing ready to be “propositioned” by a client: “[They] depend upon someone coming forward with the proposition in one hand and the money bag in the other.” The Nightingale team have set out to avoid this compromise by sticking to low-cost principles and finding ways to fund their projects, keeping the owner-occupier and the architect at the centre of the process. Questions 19 – 22. Which paragraphs contain the following supporting information? Match the information to the paragraph number. 19. Locating developments close to public transport can help reduce costs Answer 1 Question 10[select: , Paragraph 1, Paragraph 2, Paragraph 3, Paragraph 4, Paragraph 5, Paragraph 6, Paragraph 7, Paragraph 8, Paragraph 9] 20. Quality control in residential building in Australia varies from state to state. Answer 2 Question 10[select: , Paragraph 1, Paragraph 2, Paragraph 3, Paragraph 4, Paragraph 5, Paragraph 6, Paragraph 7, Paragraph 8, Paragraph 9] 21. The fact that the project is already being replicated is an indication of its success. Answer 3 Question 10[select: , Paragraph 1, Paragraph 2, Paragraph 3, Paragraph 4, Paragraph 5, Paragraph 6, Paragraph 7, Paragraph 8, Paragraph 9] 22. An initial project which aimed to be sustainable in multiple ways. Answer 4 Question 10[select: , Paragraph 1, Paragraph 2, Paragraph 3, Paragraph 4, Paragraph 5, Paragraph 6, Paragraph 7, Paragraph 8, Paragraph 9]

Question textSection E Read this paragraph and answer the following questions. In the digital economy, the phrase "the customer is the product" means that customers' data is often what companies are selling. When using free online services like social media, search engines, or email, users do not pay with money but with their personal information. Companies collect data on users' habits, preferences, and activities, then sell this data to advertisers or use it to target ads more effectively. For example, when you use a search engine like Google or a social media platform like Facebook, these companies track your searches, clicks, and likes. They use this information to build a profile of you and sell targeted advertising space to businesses that want to reach people like you. This model is profitable for companies because advertisers are willing to pay more to reach specific audiences. While this can lead to more relevant advertisements for users, it also raises concerns about privacy and how personal data is used and shared without explicit consent. Questions 12 - 14. Which of the following ideas are mentioned in the text? Select three ideas IN THE SAME ORDER as they appear in the text. a. A social media user’s online activity can be used to construct a picture of the user. b. Online ‘free’ services that people use are arguably not completely free. c. Selling personal information can improve the quality of the advertisements for customers. d. Social media platforms can help customers to find products and services they like. e. Users of online services should be aware how the company providing the service may use their personal data. f. Using social media and search engines more often can improve a user’s profile. 12. Answer 1 Question 8[select: , a. A social media user’s online activity can be used to construct a picture of the user., b. Online ‘free’ services that people use are arguably not completely free., c. Selling personal information can improve the quality of the advertisements for customers., d. Social media platforms can help customers to find products and services they like., e. Users of online services should be aware how the company providing the service may use their personal data., f. Using social media and search engines more often can improve a user’s profile.] 13. Answer 2 Question 8[select: , a. A social media user’s online activity can be used to construct a picture of the user., b. Online ‘free’ services that people use are arguably not completely free., c. Selling personal information can improve the quality of the advertisements for customers., d. Social media platforms can help customers to find products and services they like., e. Users of online services should be aware how the company providing the service may use their personal data., f. Using social media and search engines more often can improve a user’s profile.] 14. Answer 3 Question 8[select: , a. A social media user’s online activity can be used to construct a picture of the user., b. Online ‘free’ services that people use are arguably not completely free., c. Selling personal information can improve the quality of the advertisements for customers., d. Social media platforms can help customers to find products and services they like., e. Users of online services should be aware how the company providing the service may use their personal data., f. Using social media and search engines more often can improve a user’s profile.]

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